Sarah Tucker on succession and ‘the dangerous art of being next’

Sarah Tucker

Succession is one of the few words in business that manages to sound both grand and faintly medieval. It suggests continuity, legacy, stewardship and possibly a walnut-panelled room where a family member is quietly being disinherited beside a chilled bottle of mineral water. It is meant to reassure. In practice, it often does the opposite. The moment someone announces themselves as the heir to anything, everyone sensible checks the exits.

This is not only true of media dynasties, mafia families and men in expensive knitwear standing near helicopters. It is also true of young entrepreneurs, consultants, creatives, coaches and founders, many of whom are tempted, sooner or later, to position themselves as the next somebody else. The new Steve Jobs. The female Elon Musk. The next Oprah. The new Edward de Bono. At which point the room hears less ambition than need, and the need is rarely attractive.

The question is not whether succession has value. It does. Without succession, every generation has to invent fire, manners and invoicing from scratch. We inherit language, methods, markets, tools, mistakes, myths, and occasionally a filing system that should have been burned with civic honours. The entrepreneurial task is not to reject inheritance. It is to know what to inherit, what to refuse, what to adapt, and what to leave respectfully on the mantelpiece.

Succession, the television series, understood this perfectly. Its genius was not simply that the Roy children wanted power. That would have made it a boardroom soap with better tailoring. Its genius was that none of them could separate the company from the father, the father from the wound, or the wound from the job title. They were not merely competing to run Waystar RoyCo. They were competing to be recognised as the legitimate continuation of Logan Roy. This is where succession becomes less strategy than séance.

Young entrepreneurs should study this carefully, preferably before ordering embossed stationery. Wanting to build on someone’s work is intelligent. Wanting to become their authorised reincarnation is usually where the trouble starts. It turns admiration into appetite. It also gives the market an easy test, because once you declare yourself the new version of a famous predecessor, you invite everyone to compare you with the original, and the original has one enormous commercial advantage. He is not available to disappoint anyone further.

The Godfather Part II is often used as proof that the sequel can surpass the original. It deepens the story, darkens the inheritance and shows the terrible cost of taking over not only the family business, but the family logic. Michael Corleone does not simply succeed Vito. He improves the machine and loses the soul. That is a very useful warning for founders, especially the efficient ones. You can professionalise the legacy while destroying the thing that made it worth inheriting.

This is the first lesson of succession. The successor must ask what is being passed on. Is it a name, a method, a market, a moral purpose, a posture, a costume, or merely a hat placed at a jaunty angle over an expanding ego? The answer matters. A name is not a strategy. A method is not a personality. A philosophy is not a logo. A reputation is not a voucher.

French Connection II offers a different lesson. It takes Popeye Doyle out of his natural terrain and drops him into Marseille, where his instincts no longer work in quite the same way. That is what a strong sequel should do. It should not simply repeat the car chase with slightly better catering. It should move the central character into a new pattern, where the old strengths become awkward, exposed and newly interesting. For young entrepreneurs, this is invaluable. If you inherit an idea, do not photocopy its surface. Move it somewhere difficult. Test it in another weather system.

The lazy successor says, “I am carrying on the master’s work.” The interesting successor says, “What happens if this idea is put under pressure now?” That one question separates homage from entrepreneurship. The homage merchant polishes the shrine. The entrepreneur opens the window, lets in rain, children, data, contradiction, modern anxieties, and one very confused Labrador, then sees whether the idea still breathes.

The Murdoch saga shows the more brutal version of the problem. Succession in a family empire is never simply about who gets the chair. It is about who gets the meaning. Who defines the founder’s intentions? Who protects the ideological line? Who becomes the approved vessel? Who is bought out, eased out, frozen out, or sent away with enough money to look cheerful from a respectable distance? In business, succession is often described as governance. In emotional reality, it is a fight over the family ghost.

Entrepreneurs love to imagine they are more modern than dynasties. They are not. Start-ups have founders, origin myths, sacred decks, founding principles, early employees who remember when the office was a kitchen table, and later employees who are told the kitchen table story until they quietly update their LinkedIn profile. Every organisation, however fresh its branding, begins to develop a court. Every court eventually develops courtiers. Every courtier knows the danger of being too original too early.

This is where lateral thinking becomes useful, because it asks us to look sideways at succession rather than simply up the family tree. Try the extreme. What if the best successor is the person least like the founder? Try the reversal. What if the legacy is protected not by repeating the founder’s language, but by abandoning it? Try the random entry. Imagine the legacy as a garden, not a crown. A crown produces rivalry. A garden asks what needs pruning, feeding, moving and occasionally digging up because it has become invasive and is frightening the neighbours.

Then try the hats. The white hat asks what is factually true. Did this person really know the founder? Did they really study the field? Have they done the work, or merely collected proximity like frequent-flyer points? The red hat asks what instinct says. Does this feel generous, or acquisitive? The black hat asks what could go wrong. Could your name, platform or credibility be used to launder someone else’s ambition? The yellow hat asks what the upside might be. Could collaboration extend reach? The green hat asks what new form could exist that belongs to neither party. The blue hat asks who controls the frame.

That last question is everything. In creative and entrepreneurial life, the person who controls the frame often controls the value. An apparently flattering approach can be a frame. “We both admire X.” “There are synergies.” “We could raise awareness together.” These phrases may be perfectly benign, but they should still be placed on the table and examined with tongs. Synergy is sometimes a word meaning two people create something neither could create alone. It is also sometimes a word meaning one person has the legitimacy and the other has a launch date.

The young entrepreneur must learn to distinguish collaboration from annexation. Collaboration enlarges both parties. Annexation absorbs one into the other’s campaign. Collaboration has clarity, boundaries, authorship, credit and mutual respect. Annexation has mist, enthusiasm, borrowed language and a suspiciously urgent need to meet before anything has been written down.

Taking a great thinker’s name “in vain” is not always done with malice. Often it comes from awe, insecurity or market anxiety. The market is crowded, and a famous name operates like a lighthouse. Attach yourself to it and you may be seen. The trouble is that lighthouses are not designed to be climbed by people carrying ring lights and personal branding strategies. Their purpose is to prevent wreckage, not provide flattering elevation.

The ego trap in succession is believing that proximity confers inheritance. I met him. He endorsed me. He liked my work. He once said something kind after a conference buffet. These things may be true, and they may matter. They do not, by themselves, create legitimacy. Legacy is not a selfie taken with the dead. It is a responsibility to the living use of the work.

For young entrepreneurs, the value of succession lies in continuity without impersonation. Study the original deeply, then earn the right to depart. Use the method, not the halo. Protect the source, but do not embalm it. Give credit, but do not shelter beneath another person’s name because your own has not yet acquired weatherproofing. Build the sequel only when you have a new pressure, a new audience, a new form and a new necessity.

The best successors are rarely those who announce themselves most loudly. They are the ones who understand that legacy is not a throne to sit on, but a question to continue. A crown can be seized. A question must be worked for. That is less glamorous, of course, and much harder to photograph beside a fountain pen, but it has one great advantage. It produces something genuinely new.

And that, for an entrepreneur, is the only succession worth having. Not the right to wear the name. The courage to move the idea on.